British Gas engineers get @Road assistance

British Gas has signed a deal with @Road, a provider of mobile resource management solutions, to get the best out of 6,500 field engineers.

The company's engineers currently handle around eight million service calls each year and the company expects the @Road Taskforce system to make sure those resources are used most effectively to ensure the best available engineer is sent on each call.

Last year, the system was trialled on the company's electrical and housing services divisions and British Gas, part of Centrica, was adding engineers at a rate of around 350 per week. That stage was completed in October 2005 and the companies today announced that the system has now been rolled out to around 6,500 British Gas field engineers.

The system synchronises call centre data and job dispatching with the movement of the engineers out in the field.

Andy Burling, head of planning and development at British Gas Services said in a statement: "With the deployment of @Road Taskforce, we wanted to further automate the way work is dispatched, improve the productivity of our engineers in the field and build on our customer service-driven mentality."